Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon was on the losing side three years ago when the Senate Intelligence Committee secretly considered whether the government should change its policy of collecting bulk telephone records.

Wyden has long fought against the collection of the phone data -- which includes such things as the time, length and place of the calls -- by the NSA, but he could speak about it in only circumscribed terms before Snowden's revelations.

"I'm encouraged that more and more legislators and others who have supported the present system are now calling for dramatic reform," Wyden told AP. "My sense is, increasingly on a bipartisan basis, legislators are seeing how fraught it is for government to hold the records."